17 April 2009

New blogs (for me) on Middle Eastern politics

Concerned about news reports that tensions and perhaps violence are rising in Iraq, I've started identifying blogs that might help me monitor things there.

Juan Cole writes in breezy fashion, providing above all a useful news roundup that in recent days has focussed on human rights. (I say "in recent days" because I'm new to the blog so can't speak of its history.)

3 comments:

Incredible that you'd be reading Juan Cole to get "useful news" about anything, let alone about human rights. He's been called "the historian who can't even get his own history straight." Here's one reason why. If anyone's a useless hack, he is. You should be ashamed.

While Cole and the National Iranian American Council—the Islamic Republic's de facto lobby in Washington—play down Iranian rhetoric and deny any incitement to genocide, a number of scholars, most prominently Tel Aviv University scholar Joshua Teitelbaum, editor-designate of the Middle East Quarterly Denis MacEoin, and German political scientist Matthias Küntzel, have chronicled Iranian rhetoric, including its dehumanizing medical metaphors recalling those used by Nazi propagandists since Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.[15]President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lectures above a sign saying "Death to Israel" in Persian and Arabic, not "Down with Israel" as in the English translation below. Ahmadinejad has also declared in Persian that Iran will "wipe Israel off the map." University of Michigan's Juan Cole argued that the phrase was a mistranslation and that Ahmadinejad did not have genocidal intent.